As the music publishing industry has adopted new technology, sheet music has evolved into paperless digital formats. Rather than print musical scores and produce books of music, different sheet music providers have developed software that displays musical score data on a computer screen. The growth of the Internet led to the modern era of digital sheet music, beginning with the 1997 Sunhawk Solero and SheetMusicDirect web-based systems. Since then, MusicNotes, Sibelius, MusicRain/Legato, and others have also entered the market, while FreeHand Systems acquired Sunhawk in 2003.
With the release of electronic book or tablet appliances such as the iPad, many different digital sheet music software applications (hereinafter “apps”) have entered the market. The first of these apps displayed digital sheet music as stored in Portable Document Format (PDF) files. Soon afterwards these programs added the ability to annotate the sheet music with graphical markings. Also, they added the capability, for use with suitable hardware platforms, to play an audio file while displaying the sheet music.
Later generations of iPad apps added more interactivity. The NoteStar app from Yamaha allows musicians to listen to music playing back in synchrony with a scrolling digital sheet music display with automatic system and page updating.
Nevertheless, despite recent advancement, little has been done to adapt existing electronic publication tools to fit the growing portable media device market. Most of the current generation of digital sheet music apps only work on the iPad and other iOS devices. Apps are generally not portable between devices without extensive software development work, so these apps are not easily moved to alternate mobile and tablet platforms such as Android and Windows 8, nor can they work with standard web browsers. Cross-platform application development environments often provide a sub-standard user experience on any single device based on the lowest common denominator between devices.